Missouri, North Carolina among first schools to embrace the pass

The country was changing before the young football coach’s eyes as he settled onto the grounds of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition.

His purpose for the late-October trip to Atlanta — a game between North Carolina and Georgia — was but a small part of a fair intended to showcase the industrial New South.

Among the 800,000 visitors included President Grover Cleveland, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe and Charles Francis Jenkins, who captivated visitors with a demonstration of a new film projector called the Phantascope. Weeks earlier, Booker T. Washington used the stage to propose the famed “Atlanta Compromise,” which encouraged blacks to accept segregation in exchange for education and due process.

But for 26-year-old John Heisman, a first-year coach at Auburn in town to scout Georgia, the biggest development came by chance on a gray afternoon at Jackson Park.

At a time when a series of player deaths threatened to sentence football to the same fate as ancient gladiatorial combat, he witnessed a way to break up the bone-rattling mass formations.

With North Carolina lined up to punt deep it its own territory and cries of “Block that kick” reportedly ringing from the crowd of 1,500, punter Joel Whitaker Jr. panicked under pressure and pitched the watermelon-shaped ball to an open teammate in the right flat. The receiver, Heisman wrote in Collier’s Magazine, caught the illegal pass and raced 70 yards for the only score of the game.

Bulldogs Coach Pop Warner stormed onto the field in protest, but the unwitting referee allowed the play to stand.

“I had seen the first forward pass in football,” wrote Heisman, who later became immortalized as the namesake of college football’s most prestigious trophy.

It was the throw that saved the sport — and a play that provides an obscure century-old tie between North Carolina and Missouri.

The two schools, who will meet today in Shreveport, La., for the Independence Bowl, were on the vanguard of a football revolution: UNC as a forbearer of the forward pass and MU as one of the first programs to embrace the innovation when it was legalized in 1906.

The Tigers, perhaps to keep up with their pioneering in-state rivals to the east — Saint Louis University’s Bradbury Robinson is widely credited with throwing the first forward pass — embraced the new way to spread the field.

Game accounts from the Tribune in 1906 regularly noted Missouri’s tosses, including in a 23-4 victory over Kirksville, which the Des Moines Daily News said featured “probably the first use of the long forward pass.” By 1908, Tigers Coach W.C. Monilaw wrote in Baseball Magazine that Missouri‘s “forward-passes were more successful than those of any other team in the West or Southwest.”

The nation was moving forward, and so was the sport that would become its pastime.

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Accounts vary on the birth of the forward pass.

Several reports suggest the first successful throw was completed as early as Nov. 30, 1876, in a game between Yale and Princeton. According to the 2007 book, “Forward Pass,” Yale freshman Walter Camp was falling to the ground when he instinctively threw the ball forward to teammate Oliver Thompson, who then ran for a touchdown. When Princeton protested the illegal pass, referee C.B. Bushnell, a Yale undergraduate, determined the ruling by a coin toss. The touchdown stood.

Yet few dispute the most important toss came down South nearly two decades later.

From the sideline in Atlanta, Heisman sensed the significance of Whitaker’s accidental throw. He promptly wrote to Camp, then the coach at powerhouse Yale and chairman of the rules committee.

“Here was a way to open up the game we loved,” Heisman wrote in Collier’s. “The forward pass would scatter the mob. With the forward pass, speed would supplant brute strength.”

Heisman knew something needed to change. Football was waging a battle on multiple fronts, enduring a tide of crippling player injuries and widespread calls to banish the sport.

In 1894, after a game between Yale and Harvard that became remembered as the “Hampden Park Bloodbath,” Harvard President Charles Eliot decried the game as “unfit for colleges and schools” and “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting and bullfighting.”

As former St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports editor Bob Broeg wrote in “Ol’ Mizzou,” his 1974 volume on MU’s football history, “Although players wore shin guards, nose guards, quilt-padded pants, and sleeveless jackets over their jerseys, not even long hair sufficiently protected exposed heads.”

Heisman’s first appeals to legalize the forward pass went unheard, but he continued to lobby. He convinced Navy Lt. Paul Dashiell, then the rules committee chair, that reform was needed, and together they built a coalition of support among college officials and newspaper sports editors.

A brutal 1905 season and a presidential intervention provided the final burst of momentum for change. The Chicago Tribune reported there had been 18 player deaths — at all levels of football — and 159 serious injuries that year. President Theodore Roosevelt, a fan of the sport whose son played for Harvard, then wielded his big stick.

“I demand that football change its rules or be abolished,” Roosevelt said, according to several accounts. “Brutality and foul play should receive the same summary punishment given to a man who cheats at cards!”

In January 1906, the American Football Rules Committee adopted 26 new rules, including the introduction of the forward pass.

Many protested — Warner, burned by the play years earlier, called the advance “a bastard offspring of real football” — and early guidelines for the pass were restricted. According to Phillip L. Brooks’ “Forward Pass,” passes were required to cross the line of scrimmage and be caught at least 5 yards wide of each side of the center and possession was lost if the ball struck the ground untouched.

But football had been saved.

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The first team to flaunt the new weapon came from the Show-Me State ... but not Columbia.

On Sept. 5, 1906, first-year SLU Coach Eddie Cochems led his team of seven transfers and nine holdovers on a historic trip to Carroll College in Waukesha, Wis. Cochems, who had befriended Heisman — then the coach at Georgia Tech — the year before as an assistant at Wisconsin, was ready to show off his pioneering new offense and the quarterback he brought with him from Madison.

After the Billikens’ first pass attempt fell to the turf untouched off the arm of Robinson — a turnover per the new rules — the 21-year-old transfer from Wisconsin connected with Jack Schneider on an out pattern for a 20-yard touchdown.

It was the first legal forward pass in the history of American football, according to Brooks, and established a theme for SLU’s season.

While many schools considered the play too risky, the Billikens mauled opponents. They were the city’s first incarnation of the Greatest Show on Turf, outscoring a roster of teams like Kansas and Iowa 407-11 in an undefeated season.

All the while, officials at the state school to the west simmered. Missouri resented the success of a program that stocked its roster with stars from other colleges. It refused to schedule SLU.

“St. Louis is playing a lot of coal-heaving huskies who do not have the slightest resemblance to legitimate and genuine college students who are in school to get an education,” Monilaw told the St. Louis Star-Chronicle.

The Tribune reported Cochems “jumped out of his boots” when confronted with the accusations.

“Just because other colleges have made fools of themselves by adopting these crazy rules is no reason why should follow their lead,” Cochems said. “Missouri is jealous of our strong team. We could beat them 100 to 0. Because I have the brains to teach my men new plays that others never thought of and put up a better article of football, they say slurring things about ‘professionalism.’ ”

In truth, however, MU was hardly behind the times.

Monilaw, the Tigers’ first-year coach, welcomed the possibilities of the novelty play. A Tribune headline before the season opener promised the “Missouri Kirksville Game Will Be Fast.”

“They will make frequent use of forward passes,” the paper reported after consulting with Monilaw.

Although it is unclear how frequently MU tested the new rules, the pass helped the program achieve new levels of success. After the Tigers went 15-26-2 in the five seasons before the 32-year-old Monilaw arrived, they did not lose more than twice each of the next five years.

Tribune game stories often noted the quarterbacks’ heaves, like when the Tigers relied on a mix of “straight football and the effective use of the forward pass” to beat Arkansas 11-0 in 1906 or tossed “four long forward passes” in a 40-0 victory over Washington (Mo.) in 1908.

Monilaw left Missouri after the 1908 season, but the vertical game was there to stay — and, by the 1920s, a staple of the Tigers’ offense. They completed 14 of 24 passes in a 7-7 tie against Southwestern Conference champion Southern Methodist in 1926, and a year later fullback George Flamank connected with Bert Clark for the only touchdown in a 7-6 win over Nebraska.

The next decade, as “Slingin’ ” Sammy Baugh revolutionized the professional game in the National Football League, Missouri had “Pitchin’ ” Paul Christman. The Maplewood native threw for 2,989 yards between 1938 and 1940 and led the nation with 13 touchdown passes as a senior.

Heisman, who died in 1936, watched with pride as the game he helped save evolve and flourish. If only he could have seen Missouri today.

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